Through Her Eyes: Three Women Artists Explore Childhood, Play, and Perception

Through Her Eyes, an exhibition presented by The Kult Talk at Friendly Grounds in London, brings together three contemporary artists: Anna Kiparis, Tatiana Fetisova, and Olga Bonitas – whose work transforms personal experience into distinct visual languages. Running from 3 March to 4 April 2026, the project explores themes such as motherhood, childhood, play, and inner perception, inviting viewers to witness how these intimate realities are translated into colour, form, and symbolism.

The artists discuss the personal and philosophical threads that shape their practice – from analytical structures and playful systems to the delicate rhythm of motherhood and the emotional weight of memory. Here, they reflect on the interplay between lived experience and artistic expression, offering insights into the perspectives that inform Through Her Eyes.

Tatiana Fetisova: Balloonized Realism and the Fragility of Memory

The exhibition focuses on women’s perspectives in contemporary art. Do you feel your approach to themes like childhood, vulnerability, and perception is influenced by your experience as a woman, or do you see these ideas as more universal?

I think it is initially personal, and as a woman, it naturally comes from a female perspective. It also begins with my own understanding of vulnerability and how my personal story has shaped the way I perceive life. At the same time, once the work is finished, it no longer belongs only to me. A viewer may see something completely different based on their own experiences. For me, this is one of the most important parts of art. If my work can evoke different emotions or memories in someone else, then it becomes something more universal than my personal story.

In Chasing the Air, the child is surrounded by soft pink spheres resembling balloons but also suggesting neural forms. How does early childhood memory influence this imagery?

It’s an interesting question. Scientists believe that in early childhood, the brain grows very quickly, constantly creating new neural connections. Because of this rapid development, earlier and less stable memories can easily be overwritten. This is one of the reasons why most of us don’t remember experiences from before the age of three or four. In ‘Chasing the Air’, the pink balloons can certainly be seen as something similar to neural connections. The girl is carrying one balloon – a symbol of a new memory – while standing beside a large cluster of others that may easily disappear one day.

Of course, this is only one possible interpretation of the painting. I love that my work can resonate with people in different ways.

Your “Balloonized Realism” style feels symbolic yet figurative. Did symbolic art traditions influence it, or was it intuitive?

I’ve never really thought about it in that way. When I started developing what I call “Balloonized Realism,” I was mostly thinking about how to express what was happening in my mind and how to communicate it clearly. I was searching for a single object that could carry many contradictory emotions at once – lightness and pressure, joy and fragility.

The balloon gradually became that object. It allowed me to express complex feelings in a very simple way.

At the same time, I think there may have been an unintentional influence from symbolic traditions in art. I spend a lot of time visiting museums and looking at paintings from different periods, so it’s probably natural that some of that language found its way into my work without me consciously planning it.

You studied mathematical statistics and technology. Does that background influence your composition?

Yes, I think it influences both. My analytical background helps me think about structure and composition, but the most important thing it gave me is imagination. Some areas of mathematics, such as functional analysis, are extremely abstract. To work with them, you need a strong ability to imagine ideas that you cannot physically see. In a way, that kind of thinking trained my mind to visualise complex structures. It also helped me understand how to express ideas more clearly. For instance, when you are a writer, you have an entire book to tell a story. 

As a visual artist, you have only one canvas to express what is happening inside you. My analytical training helps me focus on the essential elements and choose the parts that communicate the most important feeling or idea to the viewer.

Olga Bonitas: Motherhood, Presence, and Watercolour

Your Watching Them Grow series captures small, everyday moments. Why are these moments compelling, and how does watercolour convey them?

Our life consists of moments, and I believe we only truly remember the ones where we manage to be fully present. These are fleeting things that will never repeat in exactly the same way, and painting them is my way of remembering them.

It is also an attempt to understand how my kids feel this world, to relate it to my own experience as a child, to find what we have in common and to better understand complex emotions that are not always easy to put into words. Watercolour is perfect for this because it can be a very fast and moody medium, ideal for capturing a state of mind and feeling.

Does watercolour reflect the rhythm of life with children?

My way of painting with watercolour feels similar to being a parent: everything is messy, not fully predictable, and full of surprises, but I somehow enjoy it deeply. 

I work in a very loose way, without a preliminary pencil drawing, applying wet watercolour on wet paper, using a lot of water, and letting the paint run and mix quite freely. I rely heavily on intuition and play a lot. The more I allow myself to be gently involved in the process without excessive control, the better it works out (in both painting and motherhood).

How has motherhood changed your creative process?

To be honest, I don’t quite remember how things worked without kids. My eldest is nearly 16 now, and I started my artistic career as a side project after her birth. Motherhood taught me not to postpone creativity and to seize every chance to dedicate time to my own projects.

I now treat time spent on my sketchbook as a contribution to my mental health and wellbeing.

Your series highlights motherhood without sentimentality. Is it personal, or also a commentary on societal expectations?

I do try to avoid sentimentality. I’m not interested in idealised motherhood. I’m interested in its complexity – a huge variety of feelings and emotions all existing together. This series is deeply meaningful and important for me personally, but it’s also a way to highlight the underseen and undervalued tension between motherhood and a woman’s professional realisation.

For many years, I kept my artistic practice very separate from my personal and family life. I continued working as usual while caring for two small children, and most of my friends with kids did the same. Inside my social bubble, it felt perfectly normal to work as if we had no children and to be mums as if we had no jobs.

But at some point, I started to feel that something was wrong with this “lifestyle” and these unrealistic expectations. I’m expected to fit into a model of productivity in my career that’s the same for parents and people without caregiving responsibilities. Mothers have to compete on exactly the same terms as people without children. Then I decided to place my motherhood at the very centre of my practice, at least for a while, to speak about it openly. 

I’m an artist, I am also a mum, and this shapes my time, my emotions, and the way I see the world.

Anna Kiparis: Play, Structure, and Symbolic Observation

Your work transforms everyday life into structured visual worlds. Do routine observations inform your paintings?

Much of this project draws on Michel Foucault’s preface to Anti-Oedipus, where he writes about the violence – even a kind of fascism – that exists everywhere, especially in everyday life. For me, Foucault formulated something like a manifesto that helps articulate how I understand the events we are witnessing in the world today: how systems cultivate fear in people and what that fear can ultimately lead to.

In my work, I search for ways to speak about this by proposing different conceptual paths – ways of stepping away from violence at every level, from the domestic and intimate to the broader sense of responsibility we carry toward the world.

Play became one of the answers. It is a remarkable phenomenon. In this project, I argue that the mechanisms of war and those of play can look strikingly similar: both involve competition, structure, and a goal. Yet their outcomes are entirely different. Unlike war, play is about creation rather than destruction. It is about choice – between hatred and love.

The cow recurs in your work. Is it a player or witness?

God created animals a day before human beings. If you look at the Nativity icon, you will see the ox and the donkey kneeling beside the cradle of the infant Jesus. Because they were created before us, they were given the honour of witnessing the miracle’s birth.

The cow, therefore, becomes a living symbol that reflects our own condition. In some places, life is sacred, while in others, we are reduced to nothing more than meat on a plate.

Your circular patterns balance structure and intimacy. Is this a feminine perspective?

The circle is one of the most charged forms, especially in architecture. The experience of walking alongside a straight wall is entirely different from moving along the curve of a circle or an oval – the contrast is profound.

For this reason, the circle has often become a kind of hostage to architectures of power and violence: the Colosseum, the courtroom, the Panopticon – the “ideal prison” in which a central tower allows a single observer to see every cell while the prisoners never know when they are being watched.

At the same time, the circle is also a symbol of life and continuity. In these works, I try to set the static circle against the moving one – war against play, the Panopticon against the carousel. They appear similar, yet their meanings are entirely different, much like the difference between play and war.

How do you balance control and unpredictability in your paintings?

The narratives for this project were conceived in advance through extensive studies and experiments with composition and colour. For example, I spent a long time searching for a particular shade of orange – one that could be at once vivid and playful, yet also unsettling, almost like an apocalyptic glow.

Orange became the foundation of each work, and because of its intensity, it can shine through multiple layers of paint. This effect eventually became the central artistic value of the series. By carefully controlling the palette around this orange counter-colour, unexpected nuances began to emerge in the details. In the final body of work, these subtle variations came together almost mysteriously, forming a single, cohesive visual narrative.